by Robert Foehl

Created on: July 11, 2008

Over four dollars for a gallon of gas? With fuel prices quickly running through the four dollar range and approaching five dollars a gallon, the attention of Americans has turned to lowering fuel prices and finding alternative sources of fuel. The increasing price of oil has led to a rise in energy costs across the board. In addition to climbing prices, increasing attention on global warming and pollution have lead a push for developing and using low cost energy alternatives that produce little to no pollution. In the conservation of our natural energy sources, many factors and alternatives must be considered.

Nonrenewable energy resources include coal, oil, and natural gas. These are the resources that Americans have been dependant on for electricity, heat, and fuel for their cars. These resources were in seemingly inexhaustible supply at one time but the human population has grown and consumption has increased dramatically. With these energy sources taking hundreds, sometimes thousands of years to develop; human consumption has far surpassed the earth's ability to generate these sources of fuel. Couple this with the environmental impact that using these nonrenewable sources of energy have, conservation of these nonrenewable resources and the implementation and use of renewable sources of energy have become a global focus.

Coal Energy

Out of the nonrenewable energy resources in the United States, coal is the most abundant. Large coal deposits in the United States constitute one quarter of the world's known supply of coal. There are estimations that at the current consumption rate, the coal available in the United States is enough to meet American demand for the next 200 years (America's Power, 2008a). Half of the electricity produced in the United States comes from coal power plants. Relatively inexpensive to mine and convert to energy, coal has proven to be the fossil fuel of choice in the United States. New technology and research has been able to turn coal from a gross polluting source of energy to an energy source that can comply with current environmental standards (America's Power, 2008b).

Continued research on carbon capture and CO2 reduction produced by these plants is still in process. The FutureGen Alliance seeks to develop a zero-emissions coal plant in the United States. Originally backed by the United States Department of Energy (DOE), the FutureGen Alliance recently encountered a setback in March of 2008 when the DOE retracted $1.8 billion dollars

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